Explore by

Out of the Shadows

Out of the shadows : post-1917 Russian emigration rediscovered

‘Our children, our grandchildren will never be able even to imagine the Russia in which we once lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understand’ Ivan Bunin

100 years ago the Russian Exodus started. Following the revolutions of 1917, as many as three million people fled their native land, among them many of the best representatives of early 20th-century Russian culture. Most of the émigrés, including the writers Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Tolstoi and Nadezhda Teffi fled to Western Europe, where their determination to preserve their cultural heritage saw the effective creation of a Russia Abroad. The University Library books which feature in this exhibition and which have never been shown before have original autographs by Bunin, Teffi, and Tolstoi.

The exhibition, which follows the year-long Revolution: the First Bolshevik Year digital exhibition, was curated by Vera Tsareva-Brauner of the University’s Slavonic Studies Section.